House - 16th/17th century, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin

The house that once stood here has been gone since the twentieth century, yet the street name it left behind, Manor Street, quietly preserves its memory for anyone who thinks to ask where the name came from.

The manor at Grangegorman was originally one of three held by the Augustinian Priory at the Church of the Holy Trinity, before the dissolution of the monasteries brought that arrangement to an end in the sixteenth century. In 1559, a Royal Mandate confirmed the property to Francis Asgard, and it remained with his family until at least the mid-seventeenth century. It subsequently passed to Sir John Stanley, whose son was in occupation by 1674, and in the early eighteenth century it came into the hands of Charles Monck. By 1756, the building was substantial enough to appear on John Rocque's detailed map of Dublin, one of the most reliable records of the city's layout at that period. The house's final chapter was perhaps its most quietly remarkable. In 1814, a Mrs John O'Brien purchased the property after founding a refuge for what the records describe as 'Unprotected Girls of Good Character' in nearby Ashe Street. Dr Murry, Coadjutor Archbishop of Dublin, then invited Mother Mary Aikenhead, founder of the Sisters of Charity in Ireland, to take charge of the new institution, and a formal House of Refuge opened on the site in 1819. Numerous buildings were added over the following century before the original house was eventually demolished.

When ground works were monitored on the site in 2014, archaeologists uncovered masonry walls that may well belong to the original structure, though the associated finds, pottery sherds, oyster shell, brick fragments, and broken sewer pipes, came from disturbed nineteenth and twentieth century contexts rather than anything earlier. There is no standing fabric to observe today, but the excavations report, available through excavations.ie under licence number 14E0051, gives a useful account of what was found. The broader Grangegorman area, now largely occupied by Technological University Dublin, is undergoing significant redevelopment, which makes the buried evidence of the manor all the more contingent on whatever future ground disturbance might reveal.